Banking/finance software for old time Quicken 2004 user?

Starting to think about what I'm going to do when Lion is out...seeing as how Lion will not support Rosetta. I am still using Quicken 2004; I've never had a reason to "upgrade" before.

However, now that Lion will not include support for Rosetta or any PowerPC application, I am going to have to lay out some sort of upgrade plans.

Quicken's current Mac "offering," Quicken Essentials for Mac, appears from everything i have read/seen to be a substantial step backward in features and functionality. It may still work for me as I don't do online bill paying, but i do track investments and it sounds like this product has limited or no support for that level of functionality. Further, as far as I can tell from the Intuit website, there is a migration strategy from Quicken Mac 2007 to Quick Essentials Mac, but there does not appear to be a migration strategy from Quicken 2004. I have little desire to buy Quicken 2007 first just to upgrade, especially as the only one I found online for sale is over $150!

I have a ton of data in my Quicken file going back to the "early days" of this software, starting with the Windows version (sorry), running the Windows version under Wine on Linux, migrating to Mac - and spending days fixing import problems and the like. I hate to have to start over...

MoneyDance seems reasonably popular, but one worry I have is that Lion will also not include a Java runtime (even though it will be "easy" to install one...). Any MoneyDance users who can allay my fears, and can comment on the transition from Quicken to MoneyDance?

I also looked at iBank but it seems to be a new product, and I have so much data invested in Quicken that I feel uncomfortable with a product when I don't have a handle on long term viability.

I've been using MoneyWell, and it's working pretty well for me. It currently doesn't support DirectConnect BillPay, but that's supposed to be coming in v2.0 (and it already supports downloading statements via DC).

One nice thing about MoneyWell is that they also have a rather nice iOS app, which syncs with the desktop version over WiFi, and very soon, should sync over the Internet as well. Best of all, it allows you to sync multiple devices with the desktop file, so I can see when my wife has drained the checking account, and vice versa.

iBank isn't a new product (it's on version 4 now IIRC) and has been around for years. That said, I used it for version 2 and 3 and I wouldn't recommend it. Too many problems with display/GUI bugs that would affect displayed account value (especially for stock portfolios) that I saw in v2 and continued to see in v3. I had lots of problems with account-account transfers not being duplicated on both ends. Also their import auto tag/filters were pretty limited.

I've been demoing See Finance for ~6 months and am pretty happy with it. Especially nice that it will show you potential duplicated transactions and color them based on how sure it is that the transaction is duplicated or not. You can also tell it to auto label transactions based purely on the amount of the transaction -- really useful for me since I pay my rent by check and so the only identifying information is that it's the same amount each month. My main problem with See Finance is that there are no user forums and no developer blog/twitter. That said, every time I've emailed them, I've received a response within 24 hours.

I've flirted with a few personal finance applications before and all found them frustrating for one reason or another.

I started using Mint.com and like it a lot. All of my bank accounts are there, along with assets such as my car and 401(k), and credit card accounts as well. I still have to log onto my bank website to pay bills, but that's fine as it allows me an opportunity to check and make sure everything is as it should be in my accounts.

It's all web-based and there's an app for the iPhone as well so you can check and edit things while on the go.

the ads and suggestions to get your credit scored updated or get another credit card are a little annoying, but it's a free product and they have to make their money somehow. and the credit card part is actually handy for finding the "right" card for you based on your spending habits (what you buy with your card) and what kind of rewards are most important to you.

Two weeks ago, I would have resoundingly concurred with the recommendation for Mint.com. However, the past 2 weeks have been a real pain in the ass, as several of my accounts have stopped updating regularly.

It'd be a great product if they could get some of the reliability worked out - unfortunately, they seem to be the only game in town that has all of the features that I use.

Quicken's current Mac "offering," Quicken Essentials for Mac, appears from everything i have read/seen to be a substantial step backward in features and functionality. It may still work for me as I don't do online bill paying, but i do track investments and it sounds like this product has limited or no support for that level of functionality

Well, last spring when Intuit was getting blasted for the deficiencies of Quicken Essentials, Intuit said two things: 1) those with non-online investment accounts to track should stick with Quicken 2007, 2) a full featured new version of Quicken for Mac will eventually appear (perhaps in 2011).

So, they did promise an updated version at some point. Who knows whether that will appear before Lion, but there's a chance at least. They are continuing to extend the online functionality of Quicken 2007 and sell it on their website until that new product is released, so perhaps that's at least some hint that it will be released eventually (in the past, online functionality "expired" about two years after the product appeared)

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. Further, as far as I can tell from the Intuit website, there is a migration strategy from Quicken Mac 2007 to Quick Essentials Mac, but there does not appear to be a migration strategy from Quicken 2004. I have little desire to buy Quicken 2007 first just to upgrade, especially as the only one I found online for sale is over $150!

Intuit still sells quicken 2007 for mac on its website for $70. I would not advise you to buy it though. I would think the new full version might allow import from 2004, and if not, if you know someone who has quicken 2007, their copy could be used just for the purpose of updating your data to 2007 so that it could then be imported to the new version.

Two weeks ago, I would have resoundingly concurred with the recommendation for Mint.com. However, the past 2 weeks have been a real pain in the ass, as several of my accounts have stopped updating regularly.

It'd be a great product if they could get some of the reliability worked out - unfortunately, they seem to be the only game in town that has all of the features that I use.

The reliability can be frustrating at times, especially if you don't have a lot of extra cash in your accounts.

but seeing as it's web-based it's platform independent and you can access it from anywhere. I'd recommend giving it a look. seeing as it costs nothing, if you don't like it you're out nothing besides your time, which you'd be out if you bought a program anyway.

Mint.com is NOT a checkbook management program or financial management program. It doesn't let you enter in transactions and then reconcile them later, nor does it let you schedule transactions. It simply downloads information from your bank and you have to hope & pray that the information is correct.

Further, as far as I can tell from the Intuit website, there is a migration strategy from Quicken Mac 2007 to Quick Essentials Mac, but there does not appear to be a migration strategy from Quicken 2004. I have little desire to buy Quicken 2007 first just to upgrade, especially as the only one I found online for sale is over $150!

I was in the same boat (same version of Quicken even!) I emailed quicken tech-support, and they sent me a link to Quicken 2006 download to convert my files over to a newer format - then provided a link to one of their help pages to convert the quicken 2006 file over to essentials.

I never did it though - I just was asking a general question on how I would do it if I wanted to. Just collating data as they say.

Quite honestly, to me, this is enough of a reason for VMware + Quicken on Windows. I've not found anything on Mac that really satisfies me, and I've tried most.

Been doing this for 3+ years now (ever since I switched). None of the other products out there will work for me. Primarily because none will import my decade of Quicken data correctly, but also due to deficiencies in most other areas (no one product does everything I need as well as Quicken does it). Reading about the issues & missing features in the Quicken Live Community forums is enough to keep me very far away from Quicken Essentials.

Unfortunately, the VMWare option probably won't even work for the OP - you can't cleanly migrate data (maybe not at all) from Quicken Mac of any vintage to Quicken Windows.

I have tried iBank and SeeFinance among others as replacements for Quicken 2007. I have over a decade of data in my quicken dataset. Both iBank and SeeFiance were able to read in the data from a quicken exported qif file. However, it did take some fiddling after importing to get the data in correctly ( not a lot but some). Hodges, I always come back to quicken mainly because its data entry method is so much more efficient than the others - especially on entering splits for check entry.

Regarding QE, they seem to have upgraded it so it will at least track your investments.

Mint.com is NOT a checkbook management program or financial management program. It doesn't let you enter in transactions and then reconcile them later, nor does it let you schedule transactions. It simply downloads information from your bank and you have to hope & pray that the information is correct.

I can enter my own transactions into Mint.com if I choose to, but my bank is pretty good about posting pending transactions within 24 hours so that's not really necessary.

As for downloading info from your bank and pray it's correct...uh...that's a reflection of your current account status. If it's incorrect that's something you'll have to discuss with your bank regardless of what banking software you use.

I suggested Mint.com as it's platform independent so it will work the same no matter the OS. Oh, and it's free.

I was frustrated with the first few iterations of iBank, but it's all good now. It's about like using quicken. Not too pretty. Not too obvious. But reliable and functional in all the ways you need it to be.

Perhaps a dumb question: what can you do with these various financial packages that you cannot do with a well put-together spreadsheet? I have a big Excel workbook with all my finances and budgets that I extend out column-wise every few weeks.

Perhaps a dumb question: what can you do with these various financial packages that you cannot do with a well put-together spreadsheet? I have a big Excel workbook with all my finances and budgets that I extend out column-wise every few weeks.

Your question is like any other question of the sort: why buy a specialized program dedicated to a task rather than hacking it together in spreadsheet or a database? For instance: why use an address book program when you can do it yourself in Excel? It depends on how much time you want to spend on re-inventing this task, how much you care about the task itself, and what you want out of it.

For $30-$60, you don't have to re-invent accounting in a spreadsheet. You benefit from smart developers thinking through and implementing the conventions of finance and giving you an easy tool to track and understand your finances with. The interfaces and tools are optimized for household finances, including more complex aspects like mortgages, auto loans, paycheck splits, and taxes. They also have tools to download data directly from your bank accounts or investment accounts. And, most importantly for me, tools for reconciling credit card and bank statements.

If your budgeting needs -- or concerns -- are simple, a spreadsheet could be the best tool for you. But Quicken-like programs bring a lot of tools and usability to the task.

If you're used to quicken 2004, iBank 4 has a similar but slightly better feature set and good support. Its reporting is less flexible than Quicken, but its search and filtering features mean that many things which required a report in Quicken can be done a different way. There is a free 30 day trial, so you can download it, read the manual, import your data and try it for a month. I found its import of 20 years of Quicken data contained only a half dozen errors and it will export to qif format so you are not trapped like you are in the new Quicken Essentials which has no useful export feature.

Mint.com is NOT a checkbook management program or financial management program. It doesn't let you enter in transactions and then reconcile them later, nor does it let you schedule transactions. It simply downloads information from your bank and you have to hope & pray that the information is correct.

So what's a good checkbook management program, especially one with an iOS app? I'm using PocketMoney Lite but it's manual entry, no chance of importing QIF files or anything like that. No problem, as I don't do that many transactions.

Also tried Checkbook Free, which imported QIF but the transactions didn't match the dates or the balances.

And what is a good investment tracking program? One that can save snapshots say or do lookup of mutual fund and ETF prices? Or do they all depend on logging into your brokers' site and pulling the data?

Kind of leery about services like Mint, which requires giving over your login and passwords. Apparently you can never delete that data from their servers.

Also, I don't know why people want both checkbook or bank transactions in the same application as investment tracking.

I thought iBank 4 was great at first -- it let me download transactions from Discover, which Quicken 2006 never did, and it did a really nice job reconciling them with entries I'd keyed in by hand. It did a reasonable job of importing my old Quicken file...

There's not a lot of *data* in those accounts, so I considered not importing those bits from Quicken 2006, and just entering them by hand. But, the way iBank deals with money market or other investment accounts takes a different mindset. You're supposed to move cash into the account, and then use that cash to purchase the investment, at which point your money disappears into the stock. This may be more realistic for how stock transactions work underneath it all, but it seems like twice as much work for me, and it's not clear there's a gain there. (Plus, it couldn't handle the fact that I can write checks off my MM account -- but neither could Q2k6, so I haven't lost so much there.)

So ... I don't know. I'm very torn. The rest of it seemed OK, but I liked Quicken better. It was the little things -- having a blank entry at the bottom to type into, or being able to hit +/-/t to increment or reset date fields, or generating a report and being able to see all the individual items in the categories in the report at once, instead of having to click on a category at a time to drill down. It didn't fill me with confidence that using it would ever be a smooth process, merely adequate.

The promise of a 60-day money back refund lured me into buying Quicken Essentials. So far, connectivity to the credit card has been decent, and tech support email reasonably prompt. However, I was shocked when there was no reconciliation process at all. I gave it a file of a year's worth of downloaded transactions, and it said, "Sure!" and just added them all in, no questions asked, without any attempt to find the duplicates.

Running Quicken under Windows feels like letting the terrorists win, but it's becoming more tempting. Suggestions? I downloaded SEE Finance, but have to admit I didn't give it a fair shake. I saw that the demo version only allowed <n> transactions, but then imported my data with 100x that amount, and kind of shut it down after that. Should I look harder?

Also, I don't know why people want both checkbook or bank transactions in the same application as investment tracking.

I can write checks off of my money market account, and do (for taxes, typically). Also, it's nice to be able to see MM, bonds, IRAs, whatever along with checking accounts in a single picture of what my net worth is at this time. I'm able to separate out what's "virtual money" and what's real in my head just fine, so I'd rather they not be silo'd away.

For a while I've been playing with MoneyWell, which seems nice and is geared more towards envelope style budgeting. For years I used MoneyDance quite happily, and may switch back.

They both have free trials and I recommend trying them on for size. The MoneyDance trial has a 100 transaction limit, but that's for inputting new transactions. You can actually test-run importing your entire dataset! The 100 transactions appears to be for new, user-input transactions. (At least, that's how it worked when I did it a few years ago.)

The other benefit to MoneyDance is it's cross-platform, so if you ever switch to Windows or Linux you've still got the exact same program. Personally, I keep my file on Dropbox so I can just use it anywhere on any platform. And don't worry about Java on Lion. It won't be an issue.

how about windows quicken? Did they just "crappify" the mac version, or are the windows ones not as "good" as they used to be? Things do not always improve with time--look at how crappy cordless landline telephones have gotten lately relative to how they were a few years ago...

how about windows quicken? Did they just "crappify" the mac version, or are the windows ones not as "good" as they used to be? Things do not always improve with time--look at how crappy cordless landline telephones have gotten lately relative to how they were a few years ago...

They've cluttered up the Windows version over the years, but it's still tolerable. I only upgrade when they sunset the version I'm using, so I'm still using 2009 until next spring.

At this point they have to tweak the UI with each version, because there are so few features they can add now. I'd actually prefer kind of an a la carte model where I pay for each group of features I need; there's a lot in Quicken that I'm not using, but I have to get Deluxe or Premium because that's the only way to get a couple of the features that I do need.

I forgot to add that See Finance has an unlimited-time demo version and both See Finance and iBank do that online transaction download/QIF thing.

I tried iBank, wasn't really impressed. I switched to See Finance, and it's functional.

My bank charges a monthly fee for external online connections, so I export QIF from their website to import. It was a pain to set up, but I've got it working now.

iBank has been working well for me. Sorry to hear about your bank: I think I would consider switching banks for that kind of silliness. (Whereas my bank simply has a deeply flawed on-line banking setup. Sigh.)

Mint is ok if your accounts all sync and you mostly just want to have records of personal accounts in one place- can't pay bills etcalso, the portfolio tracking is wacky and erratic furthermore Mint doesn't interface with TurboTax very well even though both are Quicken products

my communications with Quicken suggest that they are migrating their "personal-consumer" product line to Mint with Quicken being for commercial use

iBank doesn't communicate with my bank directly and have to import the .OCF files manually so that ruled it out for me

all of the personal finance software programs out there are pretty bad and a big part of the problem is that the banks and other financial institutions do not want to play nice with the data aggregators who are in the middle by collecting the data from all the sources for the financial software programs

Because of the attempts to automate everything, there are many times when things just don't work right. Sometimes you'll lose access to your accounts, or there are importing issues that cause errors like duplicate transactions. The result of putting your budget on auto-pilot is that it is very unreliable, and the first and foremost requirement is that it just plain works, always. As cool of an idea as it is to automatically aggregate the transactions from all of your accounts, it's just too prone to errors. If any of your banks decides to change something up, or just not play ball with Mint.com, it means you may not have access to that account in Mint for a while, and that just isn't ok.

The other dealbreaker is that it fails as a real budgeting tool. It allows you to see where your money has gone, but there is no real way to reconcile your budget at the end of the month, so that overspending in a category is accounted for. For us, this meant that balances that should have been accruing in other under-spent categories were eaten up. For instance, the $500 balance that had accrued in my "fun money" budget wasn't really there. It had slowly been eaten up by over-spending in other categories that had not been accounted for.

Because of this, our grasp of our financial situation was always fuzzy and abstract, and that's really by design. Mint.com wants to make things so easy for you, to add a veneer of user-friendliness to the budgeting process, that it really just puts a layer of abstraction between you and your finances, so that you don't really know what's going on. It's dumbed down because if they really made it a good budgeting tool, it would scare half of their user-base away. They know what they are doing...shooting for brain-dead simplicity because it will give it the greatest possible market-share, even if it means it's not a very good product.

We just moved to You Need A Budget. Not as automated, but that's a good thing. I don't know if it is suitable for the OPs needs...haven't looked at the ability to import files from Quicken.

I thought iBank 4 was great at first -- it let me download transactions from Discover, which Quicken 2006 never did, and it did a really nice job reconciling them with entries I'd keyed in by hand. It did a reasonable job of importing my old Quicken file...

There's not a lot of *data* in those accounts, so I considered not importing those bits from Quicken 2006, and just entering them by hand. But, the way iBank deals with money market or other investment accounts takes a different mindset. You're supposed to move cash into the account, and then use that cash to purchase the investment, at which point your money disappears into the stock. This may be more realistic for how stock transactions work underneath it all, but it seems like twice as much work for me, and it's not clear there's a gain there. (Plus, it couldn't handle the fact that I can write checks off my MM account -- but neither could Q2k6, so I haven't lost so much there.)

So ... I don't know. I'm very torn. The rest of it seemed OK, but I liked Quicken better. It was the little things -- having a blank entry at the bottom to type into, or being able to hit +/-/t to increment or reset date fields, or generating a report and being able to see all the individual items in the categories in the report at once, instead of having to click on a category at a time to drill down. It didn't fill me with confidence that using it would ever be a smooth process, merely adequate.

The promise of a 60-day money back refund lured me into buying Quicken Essentials. So far, connectivity to the credit card has been decent, and tech support email reasonably prompt. However, I was shocked when there was no reconciliation process at all. I gave it a file of a year's worth of downloaded transactions, and it said, "Sure!" and just added them all in, no questions asked, without any attempt to find the duplicates.

Running Quicken under Windows feels like letting the terrorists win, but it's becoming more tempting. Suggestions? I downloaded SEE Finance, but have to admit I didn't give it a fair shake. I saw that the demo version only allowed <n> transactions, but then imported my data with 100x that amount, and kind of shut it down after that. Should I look harder?

If I was in your shoes I'd just let the terrorists win this one. I "upgraded" from Quicken 2003 (or so, I can't remember exactly) to 2007 and it's a little better but hardly good enough to justify buying it now.

I've found iBank 4 to be workable, but I agree with above posters that there are plenty of little oddities, and have also been some not so little ones that are just head smackingly weird. For example, when iBank 4 came out there was no way to have custom date reports at all (which is needed for, you know, every single financial reporting period that doesn't exactly match up to a calendar month). How a new product could get released without something so basic when it had so much else updated is just mind boggling. Luckily the dev has fixed it in a usable if still suboptimal fashion (you can now enter a custom date in the form of "XX days ending in END_DATE", but not just "START_DATE to END_DATE"), and has generally been reasonably responsive. I found iBank fit me much much better then MoneyWell or the others available at the time, it's certainly more "traditional" I guess, and importantly to me it has a functional iOS client. But I can understand people not falling in love with it either.

I've been using iBank for a while and have generally been happy with it. iBank 3 was annoying for tracking mutual funds and the like because it didn't understand the concept of reinvested capital gains (among other things); those had to be classified as reinvested dividends, which isn't right... Fortunately, iBank 4 is a bit more intelligent, and my vast and far-reaching investment portfolio is small enough that going back through my old quarterly reports and fixing those didn't take all that that long.

There are a few annoyances in 4. On import of transactions, I'd love to be able to construct a filter rule that nukes all $0.00 transactions. As it is, every time I read in a credit card statement, I have to manually delete all those transactions with an iTunes receipt number or similar. iBank 3 had a setting where it would only show you the last several months of transactions in an account; for some reason, that's gone in 4 and your window has to show the entire account history. No, iBank, if I want to see my checking account history from 2003, I'll explicitly ask you for it... It would be nice to have some more control over the graphs; being able to manually set the vertical range would be good.